


The Stories He Told

by Doodle (Mystiqality)



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-02-05 08:19:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12790518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mystiqality/pseuds/Doodle
Summary: The adventures of Jacob Merish, a 19 year old college student as he tells the story of university, family and an unrequited love for his best friend.





	1. Introduction?

Okay so to be quite honest, I don’t know how to introduce this book. See I’ve tried to write a lot of other books and I mean like a lot I think the tally is around like the high thirties, low forties, it a lot. The thing is though, it’s never really gone that well for me. Somewhere along the line I seem to rambly or like I’m not giving enough to the reader, and-- okay never mind, maybe I will just intro it the same way I have in every other book and maybe it will be effective this time, or maybe it will be even become like my thing like I’ll be the author who’s famous for the way that they start off their books and I will be known distinctly that way. Yeah! Anyway, so onto the introduction:

So hi there reader, my name is Jacob Merish, I am a sophomore at North Dakota State University, I’m nineteen years old and I am in love with my best friend. 

Okay! Wait, before you close this book and put it back onto the Barnes and Noble shelf. I know you’ve heard this one before. Or you think you’ve heard this one before. Assuming they’ve shoved this book into the back alley of the YA section with the knock off Twilight vampire eroticas and the ones about the girls who are just magically  _ different _ and she probably loses her memory or is some forgotten princess and some boy, tall and mysterious comes along and --... You get the gist. 

This is not that kind of book. This is more like a memoir but it’s not. I think the best way is to start from the beginning. Not dinosaur flash back troupe beginning but the end of my senior year of highschool seems like a good place to start. I attended an arts magnet school where I was majoring in creative writing. I was in a serious relationship with this girl named Ella and we were really happy, like really happy. She was my everything. We fit together perfectly and it had been like that along time because we had been friends a long time.

Unfortunately, our relationship ended after a few months. College lead her off in a new direction, into another state actually. She went to Wisconsin and I stayed in North Dakota. So we separated a couple weeks before she was set to leave. It was a lot for me. Moving into university was difficult but I settled quickly as I grew close with my roommate Serenity. We both had the same interests and immediately became best friends. Shortly after I moved into my dorm room, my family moved house. It was quite the culture shock. For the first few weeks, there was so much to do on campus I didn’t know that I was holding myself together with tape. After things settled, I shattered.

I cried everyday for the next two months. I missed Ella so much. I spent so many nights mourning the relationship that I was barely human for a while. After some time I began to try to heal. I reached out to my friends, picked up my fragments, was open and honest with her. I found my sanity again. Now we’re good friends. 

University was going swimmingly and then I met Erin. A quirky, shy boy with a love for the worlds in his head. He was a spirit like nothing had seen before. I instantly found solace in his company and we spent a lot of time together. I learned everything I could about him through the way he spoke. We would sit for hours on end and talk about the world he had created and the people within it. It seemed as if he had always been waiting for someone to listen to him. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with everything that he was and I just loved _ the stories he told. _


	2. What Is Odd?

One of the things I always hated about people is their tendency to label things odd or weird.They loved to alienate me when I was younger because I didn’t their stereotypes. I hung out with the kids who didn’t fit in either. We built each other up day in and day out so that we could withstand them tearing us down. We had so names that weren’t our own but we took them and ran with them. I survived everything that the world through at me but I was still damaged.

I knew I was friends with the people who had tragic backstories because I had one too. Serenity had her family together but she was a perfectionist tearing herself apart from the inside out to maintain an image. Katherine had a father in a spiral of mental illness and a cocktail of insecurities. Maria built herself a shield from a young age but she was still small behind it, a whirlwind of anger and depression. Maybe that’s why Erin’s adamancy to write happy endings that still felt real always seemed so sweet. I wanted something better for myself and them.I wasn’t desperate to forgive all the bad things in my life but I knew that there had to be something better so maybe I was hoping for something at minimum redeemable.

I never knew what to expect when we found another stray puppy of a person to bring into our group. So I didn’t know what Erin’s story would be. I’ll admit it wasn’t different than ours but then again it was. I didn’t learn it all at once, but once he trusted me, which seemed to happen fast, I learned a lot. He had ghosts for parents, never there for him but still had him on the shortest leash imaginable dragging him every which way they wanted. His father was so controlling that Erin seemed to even be afraid of making his own decisions. His brothers and sisters were the same amount of mess, but I’d only learn more about them after one of them died. 

I lost Erin for a while after that. One of his brothers passed away a few months into our first semester and no matter how many times he told us he wasn’t thinking about it or it didn’t matter to him, I saw the toll it took. He became distant and emotionally volatile. I wanted to help him so much but he just wouldn’t let me. So I let him be. I missed him a lot during that period but I knew he needed his time to deal with things. 

After a month or so he seemed to resurface. His sweet brown eyes cleared and he was back to making jokes. One of the things I both love and hate about Erin is his jokes and his humor. I love it because sometimes they’re absolutely hilarious, albeit most times cringey, still hilarious, but sometimes he’s not wonderful at timing. He will misplace jokes in situations they don’t belong, but I can’t help but feel bad for him because I know he has such sweet intentions. I was overjoyed when he came back to us and I felt like the time after that we began to get a lot closer. 


	3. In His Head

Erin wasn’t good at remembering things. He seemed to have a lot of gaps in his memory and was very adamant about things being the way he had made them. He spent a lot of his time and energy looking for things he thought he had misplaced. He loved schedules and structure, it seemed to bring him a sense of calm. I didn’t know it at first but I began to like the familiarity as much as he did. The pattern of something I could rely on gave me a little bit of my sanity back because I had stability. Stability was something that I lost when my everything changed in moving. Erin and I began to spend a lot of time together, nearly any time we could. I was always so excited when I would get to meet up with him. I would go to my classes and just as I would leave I would hear the chime of my phone as he would ask me to hang out with him. I’m sure I always looked like an idiot with the shadow of a dopey grin on my face all the way to meet him.  We learned each other class times fairly quickly and we met up regularly for lunches and dinners.

I remember in the beginning Erin told me he was writing a book. At first I didn’t know what to make of that. I, being an author myself, had tried to write a lot of books but had failed. Maybe it was my personality or my work ethic but I never seemed to get to the point I wanted to. Nevertheless, I was enraptured. I loved listening to others and their ideas. It inspired my own work and gave me the drive to push my own writing over and over. The first time he had told me about a world he had been creating for seven years. I couldn’t help but think there was something he was running away from in that time. Seven years of running sounded so much like myself that I wondered really how similar we were. It was like he needed that world to escape to so it became bigger and bigger until it was everything he knew. He couldn’t even remember his own memories, or so he had convinced himself but if you asked for the backstory of one of his characters, he could launch into this endless stream of information. It was really very cute to listen to him ramble for what seemed like ages because he never seemed to lose the passion for everything that he had in his head. However, it always made me wonder what he had hidden away, what he was hiding from the world and himself. I never wanted to pry so I did what I could. I listened. 

He told me tales of gods, humans, lovers, and adventure, all the things I loved. I would hear tales of the creation of time and the elements. He had everything together for these worlds, government, religion, rules, and everything in between. I asked questions and loved to listen to him laugh. Oh what a laugh he had. It was a loud, not too deep laugh that seemed to reverberate around a room, that radiated joy and it was definitely contagious. It would always make me smile because he didn’t always laugh and it was a treat to hear. I hated my own laugh but I didn’t mind it when it was caused by him. He loved answering questions and hearing suggestions. I would pose scenarios for all of his characters and he would seem to cling to every word like a lifeline. I was invested in his story and I think he saw that. Or at least I hoped that he saw it because I was far more invested that I had imagined I would end up.

One day he suggested we write something together. A back and forth between characters of his and mine to see how they would interact. At first I was nervous, I had characters that I had written over and over the same way. So much that they practically breathed on the page but they seemed so small compared everything he had but I still agreed. I wanted this for him. Thus began our writing. I tossed my beloved characters out into his world just to see what I could do compared so the colossus of a world he had spawned. I surprised myself with how much fun I had. So many of our inside jokes would be based in references we would make in relation to the writing or in the information he told me about his book. We bantered back and forth, using the mask of the characters we had set down. We were a pair that worked effortlessly. It didn’t hurt to think about Ella anymore when I had Erin around.


	4. Confessions

I always had this thing where I was so easily inspired to the point where I would make plans to do the most ridiculous things. Songs, movies and shows were the best ways to send me spiraling. I remember listening to certain songs and just feeling this swell and grew into this massive smile on my face and I loved it. The best ones were that made me want to love. Ones that made me want to tell the person I was in love with that I loved them or even to kiss them. It was rash and never planned out at all but I still wanted to do it. 

I love that feeling. The feeling of wanting to be bigger, better, to do more with my life. Sometimes it was the absence of that feeling that made me want to do things as well. That’s how I told Erin I liked him. It was a bitingly cold night and it had been snowing for the last few days. We had left our friends’ dorm and we both lived in the same direction so we were walking back to our respective places. I didn’t plan to tell him that night it most sort of happened. As we were walking back I spent most of the time in my head debating back and forth whether or not I wanted to tell him. I honestly didn’t listen to most of what he said as we walked and I do feel a little bad about that. As we stopped in front of my hall I swear I was shaking. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it so bad.

I swallowed my tongue for a good ten seconds before I said, “Erin can I do something possibly really stupid?” I have never seen someone look so confused and so afraid at the same time. I just kept going though. “I like you.” He just sort of cocked his head at me. “I…like you like you.” I felt a bit like a middle schooler confessing his crush on someone but I guess it really wasn’t far from actually that. The pause in between me finishing and him speaking felt suffocatingly long. “Oh I see where this is going.” My heart sank and a hundred thoughts ran through my head, ‘He hates you. You fucked up. Goddamn idiot.’ But he didn’t. “I’m really flattered. I’m a mess though.” He explained how he hadn’t been the same since his brother’s death and of course I understood.

I told him that I didn’t need him to act on my confession I just wanted to tell him. It was really sweet honestly. There was a new side of him shining out. He seemed softer, more shy. He had this little giggle as we exchanged nervous jokes and shy smiles that wasn’t like his usual cynical chimed laughter. We only talked for a few minutes but in that time I wasn’t scared of rejection but there was still this air of I’m not sure what to do. We parted ways and I must have bounced into my building. I hid the ridiculous smile behind the scarf I had around my neck and went back to my room.

I laid on my bed for a while unsure of how to process what I had just done, when I got a call from my best friend Delilah. I had already texted all of my friends and freaked out to them because they had been watching me like a soap opera but Delilah’s call was different. She told me that Erin had showed up at her door and asked her what to do since I had told him that I liked him. She kept joking that she was the relationship therapist now. Christmas break came up only a few days later and we didn’t talk about it anymore. I wasn’t sure how I felt because I wanted to talk about it again but I didn’t know how.


	5. Things Never Change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will he confess his feelings or confuse everyone more? Find out this week.

It'd been months since I had told him I liked him and boy did things only get more confusing. After winter break we didn't talk at all about my confession we just carried on like nothing had been said. So I went on pining, I continued making jokes and doing anything I could in some sort of strangled attempt to show him I was in fact still in love with him. The winter was long and bitter. I spent a lot of my time on my own in my dorm because it was simply just too cold to leave. It snowed well into April and the ever blanketing snow didn't truly vanish until May. When the spring came it was really just a shift in precipitation. From snow to rain, mother nature was a far more cruel mistress than I would've liked.

As for Erin and I, things are as I previously stated, confusing as hell. We had been getting progressively closer and closer, and more physically affectionate. I had made it a habit of laying in his lap while he played with my hair and sang softly to himself. He had made it a habit of sitting in my lap every time I joking took his seat. Needless to say, our friends were very consistently rolling their eyes. Around this time as a group we had decided to start a custom Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the world of Erin's books. I was elated, a chance to spend time with him and get to interact and have fun with everyone else. So every Thursday night we all gathered in Delilah and Erin's dorm and listened as Erin talked us through the world. We each created characters that interacted with each other and the world. I think my favorite thing was the voices that Erin had for every character. Each one was distinct and was usually exactly what I had imagined in my head, or close to it. We made so many interesting memories, from fighting bosses to summoning powerful gods who trip over themselves in a tangle of ribbon. 

One of the clearest memories that my friends still will not let go is what I like to call the Machina Moment. So a little bit of background basically Erin has this character called Machina. Machina is a robot who was created through, yes as crazy as this sounds, the cannibalization of three other AI into one. He has a certain quirk however that makes him, er, unique. He likes sex and is a very sexual person. So anyway, I'm playing a character called Winnie, who is a shy, awkward, golem-like creature and we are currently on a mission to travel back in time to retrieve this artifact from someone. All of our characters have split up and mine enters a library and is browsing through the books. Little do I know, Erin has somehow chosen Machina to be sitting on the couch in the library. My character is also dressed in a simple white dress. So of course Winnie begins to interact with Machina. I don't know whether Erin did this intentionally to flirt with me or fluster me but Machina proceeded to very aggressively flirt with Winnie to the point where he comments how "lovely it would be it bend you over this couch and have my way with you." I full stopped mentally. I was supposed to roll to play off a lie as to why my character was there because we didn't fit into the timeline, but Erin had to ask me three times to roll before I finally could bring myself back to stuttering out an answer and rolling. My friends love to make fun of me for that moment, especially Delilah. 

Anyhow, summer came around and I still hadn't talked to him about my feelings. I'd had countless meetings with my friends telling me I needed to tell him. Especially since with the help of my aunt and uncle I was able to pay for housing and get placed to live with him. My friends apparently thought the tension would be too much if I didn't tell him. So I sat down and a wrote a letter and I explained all my feelings in said letter. I signed it with love Jacob and everything. And you wanna know what I did....

I didn't show him.

I was terrified of scaring him away from me because I so desperately needed something good in my life and he was in fact that good thing. He was what kept me alive some days and I know that sounds dramatic but losing someone else I loved in such a short time would tear me apart with the force of a hurricane. So I didn't give him the letter. Then. 


End file.
